On 10–11 May 1996, a storm caught several commercial expeditions high on the southeast side of Mount Everest as they descended from the summit, and eight climbers died — the deadliest single day the mountain had then known. Among the dead were the two expedition leaders, the New Zealand guide Rob Hall of Adventure Consultants and the American guide Scott Fischer of Mountain Madness, both of whom perished above 8,000 metres after staying too long on the mountain. The season’s total toll reached twelve, then the largest in Everest’s history.
The two flagship guided teams had left the highest camp on the South Col, at roughly 8,000 metres, near midnight on 10 May, climbing the standard southeast ridge route from the Nepalese side. Both leaders had spoken of a firm turnaround time — a deadline, around 1 or 2 p.m., past which a climber short of the summit must turn back to descend in daylight. That discipline broke down. Ropes that should have been fixed in advance at the Balcony and the Hillary Step were not, creating long queues at the route’s bottlenecks, and clients reached the summit dangerously late in the afternoon, some after 2 p.m. and several near or after 4 p.m. As they started down, a blizzard with winds reported above 100 km/h closed over the upper mountain and erased the route.
The disaster became the most scrutinized event in mountaineering history, in large part because the journalist Jon Krakauer was a client on Hall’s team and wrote the bestselling account Into Thin Air; the Russian-Kazakh guide Anatoli Boukreev, a guide on Fischer’s team who carried out a remarkable solo rescue on the South Col, answered Krakauer’s criticisms in his own book, The Climb. The episode reshaped the public debate over the commercialization of Everest. It also depended, as every Everest climb does, on Sherpa labour: Ang Dorje Sherpa and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa led the climbing support, broke trail, and were drawn into the rescue, work that this record places at the centre rather than the margin of the story.
Across the 1986 climbing season on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth and one of the deadliest, thirteen climbers died in a succession of avalanches, falls, illness and exhaustion — the worst single year the mountain had then seen. The toll was not one accident but a chain of them, culminating in a five-day storm in early August that trapped a group of climbers at the high camp on the Shoulder, around 8,000 metres, and killed five of them as they tried to descend. The mountain, in the Karakoram on the China–Pakistan border, stands at 8,611 metres.
The deaths spanned the whole season rather than a single day. In late June an avalanche on a new American route killed two climbers, John Smolich and Alan Pennington; days later the French pair Maurice and Liliane Barrard disappeared on the descent from the summit. July took the Polish climber Tadeusz Piotrowski, who fell after a hard new route on the south face, and the Italian soloist Renato Casarotto, who died in a crevasse fall at the foot of the mountain after retreating from a solo attempt. In early August the Polish climber Wojciech Wróż fell from the fixed ropes and a Pakistani high-altitude porter, Mohammad Ali, was killed by rockfall. Then the storm closed in.
The final phase, the August catastrophe on the Shoulder, became the season’s defining horror. Several climbers who had summited on 4 August were pinned at the top camp by a storm with winds reported above 160 km/h, without food or fuel, for roughly five days. As they finally tried to descend on 10 August, weakened and snow-blind, five died: the British climber and filmmaker Julie Tullis, the British climber Alan Rouse, the Austrians Hannes Wieser and Alfred Imitzer, and the Polish climber Dobrosława Miodowicz-Wolf, known as Mrówka (“the Ant”). The Austrian Willi Bauer and the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Diemberger survived, gravely frostbitten. The season also recorded the first ascents of K2 by women — Wanda Rutkiewicz and Liliane Barrard on 23 June, and Tullis on 4 August — achievements bound, in Barrard’s and Tullis’s cases, to the same mountain that killed them.
On 14 July 1865 a party of seven led by the English illustrator Edward Whymper made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, the 4,478-metre Alpine peak straddling the Swiss–Italian border above Zermatt — and then, on the descent, four of them fell to their deaths when the rope linking the party snapped. The victims were the French guide Michel Croz, the young and inexperienced Englishman Douglas Hadow, the experienced clergyman-climber Charles Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas. Whymper and the two Zermatt guides, Peter Taugwalder the elder and Peter Taugwalder the younger, survived because the rope broke between them and the falling men. The accident closed what later chroniclers called the “golden age of alpinism.”
The Matterhorn had been the last great unclimbed summit of the Alps, and the 1865 contest for it was a race. Whymper had failed on it repeatedly from the Italian side, partnered with the local guide Jean-Antoine Carrel; when Carrel committed to a rival Italian team, Whymper hurried around to the Swiss side and assembled a scratch party for an attempt up the Hörnli ridge. They reached the top on the afternoon of 14 July, with Carrel’s party still several hundred metres below on the Italian flank, and beat them to the summit.
The descent was the killing ground. About an hour below the top, on steep rock made treacherous by the order of the rope, Hadow slipped and knocked Croz off his stance; the shock pulled Hudson and Douglas after them, and the four fell roughly 1,200 metres down the north face to the glacier below. The connecting rope — later established to be the oldest and weakest length the party carried — parted under the jerk. Three bodies were recovered; Lord Francis Douglas was never found. Throughout, the Zermatt guides Peter Taugwalder father and son carried the local knowledge and labour that made the Swiss-side route possible, and the elder Taugwalder would spend the rest of his life under an unproven suspicion of having cut the rope to save himself.
On 1–2 August 2008, eleven climbers died on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, in the worst single accident in its history. The disaster unfolded high on the Abruzzi Spur, around and above a steep gully called the Bottleneck at roughly 8,300 metres, when a collapsing ice cliff — a serac hanging over the route — sheared away the fixed ropes that descending climbers depended on and stranded them through the night in the death zone. Most of the dead fell, were swept away by ice, or succumbed to exhaustion and exposure while trying to descend without the ropes they had counted on.
K2, 8,611 metres high on the Pakistan–China border in the Karakoram, is far more technical and dangerous than Everest, and its summit day funnels nearly every climber through the Bottleneck beneath an overhanging serac. On 1 August an unusually large international gathering — Dutch, Italian, French, Norwegian, Serbian, South Korean, Spanish and American climbers, supported by Nepali Sherpas and Pakistani high-altitude porters — set out together for the top. Confusion over fixing the ropes, a bottleneck of bodies in the couloir, and the loss of an early climber all delayed the ascent, so that most who summited did so dangerously late, some not until about 8 p.m., with the descent still ahead of them in failing light.
The toll fell across many nationalities, and especially hard on the support climbers. The dead included the Serbian Dren Mandić and the Pakistani porters Jehan Baig and Meherban Karim; the Norwegian Rolf Bae; the Frenchman Hugues d’Aubarède; the Irishman Gerard “Ger” McDonnell, the first of his nation to summit K2, who died after staying to free three entangled climbers; three South Korean climbers; and the Nepali Sherpas Jumik Bhote and Pasang Bhote, killed in the act of rescue. Survival, where it came, owed much to Sherpas — Pemba Gyalje and Chhiring Dorje among them — whose skill and decisions brought several climbers down alive.
At about 6:45 on the morning of 18 April 2014, a serac broke from the western shoulder of Mount Everest and crashed into the Khumbu Icefall at roughly 5,800 metres, killing sixteen Nepali mountain workers — the great majority of them Sherpas — in what was then the deadliest single day in the mountain’s history. The dead were not paying clients but the local staff who do the most dangerous work on Everest: ferrying loads, fixing ropes and breaking trail through the icefall before dawn, when the ice is most stable, so that fee-paying foreigners can climb later in the season. No foreign climber was killed. Thirteen bodies were recovered within two days; three were never found, entombed in the moving ice.
The avalanche struck a section of the icefall known to guides as the “popcorn field,” below Camp 1, where a column of climbing Sherpas was carrying gear up the route in the pre-dawn cold. The released serac was enormous — later estimated at tens of metres thick and many thousands of tonnes — and there was no outrunning it. Twenty-five men were caught; sixteen died, several more were injured, and the survivors carried their dead and wounded down through the same lethal ground they had just been climbing.
What followed made 2014 a turning point as much as a tragedy. In the days after the avalanche, Sherpas at Base Camp, grieving and angry, refused to continue working for the rest of the season — partly to honour the dead and partly to protest the pay, insurance and treatment of the men who bore the mountain’s worst risks. The Nepali government’s initial relief offer of about 40,000 rupees (roughly 400 US dollars) per family, barely the cost of a funeral, deepened the outrage. By late April nearly all the season’s expeditions had been abandoned, Base Camp had emptied, and the climbing of Everest from Nepal had, for that year, effectively stopped. The dead are named below; they were the centre of this event, not its background.
In August 1953, an eight-man American expedition led by Charles Houston was driven into a desperate, storm-bound retreat high on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth, when one of its members, the geologist Art Gilkey, was felled by a life-threatening blood clot at roughly 7,800 metres. Gilkey died on the descent — almost certainly swept away by an avalanche while anchored to an ice slope on 10 August — and his body was never recovered intact, though clothing and remains positively identified as his emerged from the glacier forty years later. The other seven men survived.
The expedition, the third American attempt on K2, was attacking the Abruzzi Spur on the mountain’s southeast side, the route that remains the standard line today. The team had pushed Camp VIII to about 7,800 metres and was poised for a summit bid when a violent storm pinned them in their tents for days. There, Gilkey collapsed with thrombophlebitis — a clot in his leg that soon threw emboli to his lungs, a condition that is grave at sea level and effectively a death sentence in the thin air of the death zone.
What makes the episode famous is not the death but the rescue that nearly failed and the single act that saved the rest. As the exhausted party lowered the immobilized Gilkey across a steep traverse on 10 August, George Bell slipped on hard ice and his fall, transmitted through the tangled ropes, plucked five more men off the mountain. Pete Schoening, the youngest member at twenty-five, held all six on a belay improvised around his ice axe and a frozen boulder — an act mountaineers know simply as “The Belay.” It is remembered as one of the great feats of self-rescue, and as a model of the team ethos its members called the brotherhood of the rope. Throughout, the climb depended on Hunza and Balti porters who carried the loads on the lower mountain.
On 1 September 1905, an early attempt on Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth, ended in an avalanche on the Yalung face that killed the Swiss climber Alexis Pache and three local porters. The expedition was co-organized by the Swiss doctor and photographer Jules Jacot-Guillarmod and led on the mountain by the British occultist Aleister Crowley. The disaster came amid an open revolt against Crowley’s leadership; the slide struck a party descending in the late afternoon, and Crowley, hearing the survivors’ cries from his tent at a higher camp, did not climb down to help. The four dead were left where the snow buried them.
The attempt was one of the first serious efforts on Kangchenjunga, made decades before the technology and acclimatization practices that would eventually allow an ascent in 1955. The climbers approached from the south, up the Yalung Glacier, and pushed a chain of camps onto the steep, avalanche-prone face — terrain whose danger Crowley himself reportedly recognized, having warned against descending it late in the day. The expedition reached roughly 6,500 metres, far below the 8,586-metre summit, before friction over Crowley’s autocratic command brought it to the brink of collapse.
The episode is remembered chiefly for Crowley’s conduct: his refusal to leave his tent as men died below, his cold dismissal of the accident, and his departure for Darjeeling the next morning past the disaster site without stopping, carrying with him the expedition’s funds. The judgement of mountaineering history has been severe. But the deeper record is also a sober one about early Himalayan climbing — the lethal avalanche exposure of the great faces, the absence of any rescue capacity, and the routine erasure of the local porters who made up most of the dead and most of the labour, and whose names the record never preserved.